Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

Despite himself, Jimmy turns around sharply to look at them. Feral cunts in uniform: wifebeaters, flat brim caps, neck-tatts, shaggy peroxide hair. Yeh, it’s deffo him. Damo Cudgell. Cruel fucker used to run trains on drunk footy chicks with his boys, piss on them and ditch them unconscious in parking lots.

‘Chink car?’ Jimmy says.

‘Yer mate. What about it?’ Damo can’t believe his luck.

Jimmy knows he shoulda kept his mouth shut but he continues regardless. ‘Dunno. Not the type of word you should be slinging around, y’know? Not the type of word some people appreciate, y’know?’

Damo kisses his teeth and looks at his mate. ‘Ha. Well I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, rawt? No offence if you are one though, ae . A Chink that is.’ He’s staring hard at Jimmy, obviously trying to figure out what he is. He brings up two empty longneck bottles and clinks them together. His mate raises his eyebrows. ‘Chink, Chink, Chink,’ they say in unison.

Jimmy turns back around. The bus driver is staring in his mirror. He’s seen it all but says nothing. He looks real tired and for the first time Jimmy feels sorry for him, ferrying losers and lost souls

from one shithole to another

every

day

of

his

shit-kicking

life.

Jimmy puts on his headphones and turns the music up loud, Ice Cube’s voice drowning out the bogans’ nasal voices.

He tries to stay alert, recognising the trouble he has called on himself, but the music and the tiredness from his early shift suspend him in a hazy limbo. He watches the dry world spool by.

Paddock — pub — skatepark — construction site — park — funeral parlour — motel — flatblock — pub.

A lot of the new buildings going up are freshly painted, completely clean, ready to be bombed with paint. He begins to imagine a new piece. A fire-red Dodge, on a tropical beach. Palm trees, blue sky. But something is missing. That’s it. A gorgeous blonde, like the travel agent, sitting on the bonnet. He’s never been good at painting faces, unlike Aleks, who seems to always get the proportions right. He’s about to take out his blackbook and do a sketch when the bogans’ nasal voices pierce his headphones.

‘Faggot, faggot, faggot,’ they are saying.

Always on public transport.

He closes his eyes. He imagines locking the bogans in the bus, setting it on fire and watching them run up and down the aisle, screaming like banshees — hair, clothes, skin on fire. He turns up his headphones and keeps scratching away at the Wite-Out. He looks at his bird-boned wrists and hands. He wishes he were stronger.

He wishes he were Solomon or Aleks.

When he gets off the bus he still has a fifteen-minute walk home. As he walks, he shades his eyes, cursing himself for leaving his cap at work. The sky is a gradient of white to blue, with clouds like lonely skiffs adrift, high above the heat haze. He passes a basketball court where Solomon used to play with the older kids, its chain-link fence strangely curved at the bottom to accommodate generations of arses sitting against it. There was always a strange crosswind above the court that trapped birds, sometimes for minutes at a time, before sending them flapping and tumbling away. He crosses the court and sees a fire truck next to a small patch of smoking grass. Two firefighters are drinking from water bottles, their faces sweaty.

‘Close call, ay boys?’ calls Jimmy, looking at the charred ground.

‘Bloody oath. Can’t be too careful this time of the year. Bunch of idiots running around,’ one replies.

‘Too right. You reckon it was kids?’

‘Probably.’

‘Keep up the good work, boys.’

‘Cheers, mate.’

Jimmy’s house is a duplex made of light-coloured bricks. There is a single shrub in the front yard of dark red scoria. He lives alone. Once inside, he breathes in the scent of air freshener. There’s a mounted Sin One record on the wall, from the early days, when Sin supposedly still lived with his heroin-addicted auntie. It is a standard hip hop cover, with Sin One crouched against a graffiti wall, hiding his nearly seven-foot frame. His famous green eyes ablaze. Why is it that mixed-blood Aboriginal people get the most hectic green eyes?

Jimmy looks around. Everything is perfectly in order, but he quickly wipes down the kitchen bench anyway. He has a long glass of water, which soothes the headache tolling in his temples.

The internet is one of his favourite sanctuaries — a rabbit warren of adventure. Once he has logged in to YouTube, he begins trolling well-known rappers and hip hop fans using anonymous names (he has five different fake email accounts). He does it methodically and kicks off three big arguments in a row on Facebook, the updates popping up every few seconds. His day is made when he gets an impassioned reaction from 360 himself.

The heat is a sedative. He puts on some porn and tries to have a wank, but can’t get his dick hard, so he falls asleep fully clothed.

When he wakes up it’s dark and he tries to wank again, but still no luck. What would he say if he ever met a real pornstar, like Kayden Kross or Jenna Jameson? Not much probably, but he reckons if they got to know him they’d like him. He’s never been with a blonde girl; in fact, he’s only ever been with two girls, even though he tells the lads different. One was Filo, the other was white, a redhead. Jimmy thinks of being lost in pussy, a pink-peach swirl of it, clits and tits and platinum hair. Seriously, but. Who needs real women when you have porn, ay? Far less trouble, same result in the end.

He clicks the light on and reaches under the bed to lift out a heavy shoebox. It once held a pair of Air Max, but now it holds nothing but two-dollar coins, layer upon layer. He adds another ten coins. He’s been saving twenty dollars a week for nearly four years, converting notes into two-dollars coins at a nearby laundry. The Korean lady at first gave him hell because he never washed his clothes there, but now accepts it with a shrug.

This box is how he is gonna buy the Dodge.

It represents so much energy expended, so many calls received from ungrateful motherfuckers. It is the future, the road that will lead him out of this yawn factory. Of course, the box is just a fraction of the money, the tip of the iceberg. He’s not a dumb cunt. Most of it is in the bank, but Jimmy likes looking at the coins in the box, like a square of dragon hide. He’s never told anyone about it, not even the boys. And he’s close. He’s gonna buy the car outright, call up the bloke in Sydney who sells them and wire the money straight through — no loans, no deposits. Just hard work. Unlike Solomon. Unlike his father.

Can’t wait to see the looks on their faces. Give me a couple of months, and I’m out of this shithole for good. Trust me.

The man, Ulysses Amosa, scoops up his heavy newborn and approaches the boy who is not his blood, but most definitely his charge. The boy looks afraid and retreats slightly, but Ulysses beckons and places the raw baby in the boy’s arms. The boy cradles him delicately, the baby dark against his light-brown skin. The baby cries and blinks and cycles its feet in the pine-scented air. Ulysses now bends his great head and whispers to the pair of them, addressing them equally, saying that they are brothers, that they are linked by a divine bond of responsibility, stronger even than blood, and that it must always be so.

The boy vows to carry in his heart this edict and for the first two years sits next to his half-brother protectively, smoothing curly wisps of hair, kissing him on the forehead and whispering into his ear, ‘hello brother, hello little brother, my friend.’ Yet to all observers, it takes just one look at their young eyes — the baby’s steady and black, the boy’s wavering like candleflames trying to right themselves — to recognise that the seeds have been sown for a different relationship altogether.